Mohawk

didn’t even catch your name.”
    “Call me B.G.”
    “All right, B.G. Be good. Watch out for those crushes.”
    “Can’t help it with you,” she said. When she flushed, the color dispelled the faint dinginess of her complexion and she was genuinely pretty. “Actually, it goes back to when you were thirteen and I was eleven.”
    “Come on.”
    “Really. I’d never even seen you.”
    He wouldn’t have believed the girl if she hadn’t sounded so serious.
    “I probably shouldn’t tell you what the “G” is for, but what the hell. It’s the first letter of my maiden name.”
    Suddenly Randall knew, though he could think of no reason for the sudden intuition. “Gaffney,” he said, even as he heard her say it.
    “That was my uncle you saved,” she said. “I fell for you sight unseen. What’s the matter?”
    In fact, Randall felt suddenly awash, as if he’d unexpectedly come upon the answer to a riddle he was asked long ago and had since forgotten.
    “Don’t be embarrassed. You were great.”
    He couldn’t agree. Earlier, on the outskirts of town, he had felt that everything was slightly askew, too close together. As if the disappearance of the old hospital had created a void that was drawing everything in Mohawk a little closer to the vortex, like the oil in his grandfather’s paint can. He himself had been drawn all the way from Buffalo. Maybe he hadn’t come to explain the present to his mother. Maybe she was the one who had something to tell him. She was Mather Grouse’s daughter, and she must know.
    “They’re releasing him the first of the month,” he heard the girl saying, and for some reason he concluded that she was talking about his grandfather.
    “Releasing—”
    “Yup,” she said. “Wild Bill rides again. He’s coming home.”

31
    From the back porch Anne Grouse watched her mother through the kitchen window. Mrs. Grouse had changed very little. At first Anne feared that Mather Grouse’s death might precipitate a rapid decline, since from the diagnosis of his illness Mrs. Grouse had focused all her energies on her husband and seemed ill-equipped to continue without him. But Anne had underestimated her mother, and now wondered if perhaps it wasn’t their unfortunate destiny always to underestimate each other.
    Mrs. Grouse was unaware of her daughter’s presence on the back porch, where Anne was getting the garbage ready for the Thursday collection. The older woman, having thoroughly dried the breakfast dishes with her thin dish towel—she refused to use the plastic, drainboard contraption her daughter had bought for her at Woolworth’s, preferring to dry each teacup by hand— was engaged in setting the table for her noon meal, still several hours away. She had set two places, because Anne came home from work at noon to make sure the morning garbage collection had gone off without a hitch. Her mother’s fretting about the trash had intensified over the years and now occupied her thoughts out of all proportion. When the dogs got to it before thegarbage men, she’d regale her daughter with vivid descriptions of the mess while they ate their grilled-cheese sandwiches.
    Mrs. Grouse was usually talkative during these Thursday lunches, because they were “like strangers, after all,” though they lived under the same roof. Anne had categorically refused to move downstairs when Randall went off to the university. Her daughter’s reasons for wanting to maintain a separate household were entirely unclear to Mrs. Grouse, who discussed this strange arrangement with her sister every time the old woman visited. “Queer” was the term Milly used. Anne was officially to blame, but she knew that her mother wouldn’t have things any other way and would not have allowed the introduction of her daughter’s things into the downstairs flat.
    Mrs. Grouse carefully arranged the cups and plates as if the plastic placemats were printed with exact geometric designs that matched the dishes and silver. She lined up the plates first, adjusting and readjusting, an inch this way, then the opposite, until it felt exactly right. Anne watched from the porch, fighting the hardening she felt in her heart. Her mother’s face exhibited that faraway expression that always meant she was working out some thorny point of consequence only to herself, and possibly her sister.
    Mather Grouse’s death had been the final link in the sisters’ symbiotic chain. Mrs. Grouse had been shaky and fearful, but